Mississippian Societies Research Articles

Identifying mineralogical variation in Baraboo pipestone quarry sources and its implications for Mississippian-era exchange in the midcontinent

Pipestones of the midcontinental U.S. have a long history of use by native peoples to craft high status and religious objects, especially pipes, that were often widely exchanged. In this research we describe native use of west central Wisconsin Baraboo Range pipestone as well as identify chemical and mineralogical variation within that formation. The pipestone variants are Baraboo A (dominated by kaolinite, muscovite, and pyrophyllite) and Baraboo B (dominated by pyrophyllite with minor quartz). The recognition of Baraboo pipestone variation allows us to identify previously unsourced pipestone objects. This sourcing project modifies assumptions of Cahokia-centric patterns of earspool manufacture and exchange during the Mississippian period (CE 1000-1400). It demonstrates that Baraboo pipestone Mississippian earspools were quarried, produced, and circulated among a small group of contemporaneous Mississippian societies located in the northern Upper Mississippi River valley — quite outside the Cahokia exchange network. This work establishes that employing rigorous, scientifically sound, and reproducible methodologies to identify the geological source of objects is essential to the interpretation of native interactions.

Intensification revisited: assessing resource specialization at Crystal River (8CI1) and Roberts Island (8CI41), Florida

ABSTRACT Archaeologists typically associate resource intensification with population expansion, environmental change, and political strategizing. Many Late Woodland and Mississippian societies of the Southeast eschewed dietary diversity in favor of harvesting fewer types of resources that could meet the subsistence demands of incipient aggregation. Foods such as maize and shellfish can provide humans with predictable caloric yields and are amenable to control by individuals or corporate groups. However, some archaeologists have identified scenarios in which small-scale societies intensified resources in the absence of population growth and social inequality. Ritual economies can periodically place high demands on the materials used for gatherings and ceremonies. These events then may leave material residues of economic intensification, which archaeologists might easily mistake as evidence for population expansion or social evolution. We use diversity and equitability estimates of zooarchaeological deposits from Crystal River (8CI1) and Roberts Island (8CI41), Florida, to demonstrate that some Woodland period societies periodically intensified their use of resources amidst population decline and heightened ritual activity. We suggest that the inhabitants of the area harvested shellfish at increasingly high rates to provide the material basis for a series of ritual interventions that aimed to circumvent the effects of rapid social and ecological change.

Isotopic Confirmation of the Timing and Intensity of Maize Consumption in Greater Cahokia

The history of maize (Zea mays L.) in the eastern Woodlands remains an important study topic. As currently understood, these histories appear to vary regionally and include scenarios positing an early introduction and an increase in use over hundreds of, if not a thousand, years. In this article, we address the history of maize in the American Bottom region of Illinois and its importance in the development of regional Mississippian societies, specifically in the Cahokian polity located in the central Mississippi River valley. We present new lines of evidence that confirm subsistence-level maize use at Cahokia was introduced rather abruptly at about AD 900 and increased rapidly over the following centuries. Directly dated archaeobotanical maize remains, human and dog skeletal carbon isotope values, and a revised interpretation of the archaeological record support this interpretation. Our results suggest that population increases and the nucleation associated with Cahokia were facilitated by the newly introduced practices of maize cultivation and consumption. Maize should be recognized as having had a key role in providing subsistence security that—combined with social, political, and religious changes—fueled the emergence of Cahokia in AD 1050.

Transregional Social Fields of the Early Mississippian Midcontinent

This paper employs concepts from Bourdieu’s theory of social fields and contemporary research on transnationalism to explore the complicated history of population movement, culture contact, and interaction that fueled the origins of Mississippian society in the greater Cahokia area and closely related socio-political developments in the Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV) of west-central Illinois. We offer a new take on Mississippian origins and the history of culture contact in the CIRV, arguing that interregional simultaneity and inter-group collaboration played an important part of the early processes of Mississippianization in the North American Midwest. By decentering Cahokia in our explanation of Mississippian origins in the greater Midwest, we argue for a long-term persistence of traditional pre-Mississippian practices in the CIRV region, beginning with the first documented engagement among Cahokians and Illinois Valley groups in the early eleventh century until the beginning of the thirteenth century AD.

The 2018 Richard Beale Davis Prize: Philip H. Round

The 2018 Richard Beale Davis PrizePhilip H. Round Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Martha Elena Rojas, and Jordan Alexander Stein The prize committee is pleased to name Philip H. Round’s “Mississippian Contexts for Early American Studies” as the winner of the 2018 Richard Beale Davis prize for the best essay published in Early American Literature. Among the many worthy essays selected for publication in the journal this year, Round’s distinguished itself for its far-reaching implications for the field in general. “Mississippian Contexts” shares with other contributions to this issue’s Forum on Methods and Materials in Native American and Indigenous Studies an investment in undoing a “lexicon crafted by the victors” that minimizes the significance of Native cultural production through binaries like textuality/orality, literature/folklore, rationality/mythology, and prehistory/history. Round’s essay engages with the legacy of each of these misleading distinctions in a particularly arresting challenge to received ideas about periodization. He begins by contemplating a twelfth-century copper repoussé plate representing Bird Man or Red Horn, a mythic figure whose iconography appears on material objects across the Mississippian world—which between 800 and 1600 AD extended from the Ohio River Valley south to present-day Georgia, and west to the Mississippi River and what is now Oklahoma. But Bird Man shows up in other places as well, notably in the narrative that Sam Blowsnake (Ho-Chunk) dictated in the 1980s. Considering these two distant citations of the same story, Round proposes that “the persistence of the Red Horn story and its use by a twentieth-century member of the Ho-Chunk nation offers us a window into a new methodology for understanding colonial America and the Indigenous textual sinews that knit together so many of its critical social and political relations.” The work of the essay is to substantiate that methodology by “reintroducing the Mississippian past as a viable, living historical context for studying the people and events that shaped early America.” Because the Mississippian societies had dispersed from their urban [End Page 293] centers prior to European contact, the Red Horn stories seem at first to lie outside the temporal scope of the field. And yet, as Forum editors Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup put it, “Round does not simply propose an earlier ‘early’ for early Americanists.” Drawing on archaeological evidence and “media-based historiography,” he observes how cosmologically significant concepts were embedded in spatial practices that persisted from the Mississippian period in the built environments of different Native nations in North America. Spaces such as the Creek chunky-yard reveal how, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “Indigenous space not only shaped the flow of colonial power but also colored it with narrative meaning.” Such spatial and material practices can be read even through the distorting language of European observers like William Bartram. A “text-artifact” like the copperplates that feature Red Horn, he suggests, invited performative, adaptive storytelling—a “form of narrativity”—among later Native communities. Returning in conclusion to Blowsnake’s twentieth-century narrative, Round shows how its awkward transcription into a nineteenth-century writing system developed for a different language, the Great Lakes syllabary, makes it impossible to categorize as either oral or written. Instead, as with the Mississippian art, “the narrative is a highly crafted object whose mode of production and circulation are part and parcel of its meaning.” While admirable for its detailed readings that weave together seemingly disparate objects in novel ways, Round’s essay reaches furthest at the level of its methodological and ethical implications: scholars of early America must help “restore Indigenous textual traditions like the Red Horn saga to their rightful place in the lived experiences of native peoples in America.” He argues persuasively that it is essential for scholars of early American literature to continue the hard work of formulating ways to “read” oral traditions, for doing so would allow us to better understand networks of textual transmission and citation that exist, and in some cases persist, beyond the confines of the alphabetic systems we call writing. Just as early American-ists have come to see the value in expanding our archives and our literacies in order to work...

Economic and Social Interactions in the Piedmont Village Tradition-Mississippian Boundarylands of Southeastern North America, AD 1200–1600

This research seeks to understand the economic and social interaction patterns among dispersed Piedmont Village Tradition communities in the North American Southeast, AD 1200–1600. Piedmont Village Tradition communities lived adjacent to Mississippian societies and have been categorized as a peripheral society because of this spatial relationship. We examine economic behaviors by constructing fall-off curves of local versus nonlocal lithic material proportions at settlement sites and examining the reduction behaviors and tool types at sites. The results support a possible gateway model for the acquisition and distribution of nonlocal materials that linked spatially proximate communities. To examine social interaction patterns, we conducted a Brainerd-Robinson analysis of ceramic attributes from six sites and combined our results with work by Rogers (1993). The results show sites with stylistic similarities are not the same sites that share lithic resources. We conclude that these spatially non-overlapping artifact patterns result from a heterarchical social organization with a high degree of independence between economic and social interactions. Finally, we contextualize our results within the current knowledge of Mississippian and Piedmont Village Tradition societies in the region to broaden the discussion of gateways in reciprocity-based economies, societies traditionally thought of as peripheral to complex societies, and coalescence.

Mississippian Contexts for Early American Studies

This essay argues that recognizing the continued importance of Mississippian societies to Native American peoples in the colonial period offers a more accurate portrait of encounter and exchange than previous interpretive models that overemphasize and misuse the "middle ground" concept put forward by Richard White in the 1980s. By ridding the Mississippian past of its outdated categorization as "prehis-tory," early American studies may engage in an interdisciplinary, media- based, and intersubjective methodology that will aid in reimagining the traditions of Indigenous peoples in the Americas as a set of ongoing procedures for reconstructing their ever- changing identities as nations within a nation by persistently reassembling the storied practices that have served their communities since long before the first Europeans reached their shores.

Ancestral Mounds: Vitality and Volatility in Native North America. Jay Miller. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015, 218 pp. $55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8032-7866-0.

<i>Ancestral Mounds: Vitality and Volatility in Native North America</i>. Jay Miller. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015, 218 pp. $55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8032-7866-0.

The Timing of Precolumbian Militarization in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast

AbstractBayesian chronological modeling is used to investigate the chronology of bastioned palisades during the precolumbian period in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States. Nine precolumbian settlements in the Midwest and Southeast with bastioned palisades have been subject to scientific dating (Angel Mounds, Annis Village, Aztalan, Cahokia Mounds, Etowah, Kincaid Mounds, Jonathan Creek, Moundville, and Southwind). Complete radiocarbon datasets from these sites are presented within an interpretative Bayesian statistical framework. The results provide a glimpse into the history of Mississippi period (A.D. 1000–1700) fortifications with bastions and indicate that the analyzed fortifications were built and maintained predominantly in A.D. 1200–1400. This finding suggests a greater institutionalized role for defense and warfare in post-A.D. 1200 Mississippian societies. Additionally, modeling results further indicate that the investigated Mississippian centers continued to maintain fortifications for generations after their construction.

Using Replication-Related Techniques to Examine the Significance of Fabrics in Mississippian Society

Fabrics and other fiber perishables only rarely survive in the archaeological record. To supplement analysis of physical remains, archaeologists have found that replication and related techniques can be useful in many ways. This paper focuses on the role of smaller-scale studies in investigating hypotheses about the significance of fabrics in southeastern North America between about 1000 and 400 years ago, as well as noting ways in which replication-related studies might provide additional useful information in proving or disproving particular hypotheses. As one case study, I discuss how replication-related techniques assisted me in learning more about fabrics made and used around 700 years ago in a particular Mississippian village, including something of their social and economic significance, as well as what sorts of useful information about Mississippian fabrics might be derived through additional work along these lines. Replication-related experimentation can provide important information about the time and skill required to produce particular fabrics, and thus about the socioeconomic significance of such materials and their production within a particular community. To avoid misleading results, however, large-scale projects and multiple experiments are recommended.

Storage and relative surplus at the Mississippian site of Moundville

Theories of the development of complex societies often equate the production of surpluses with centralized political economies. Most descriptions of economic intensification within Mississippian societies of Eastern North America have placed analytical explanation upon a shift from domestic autonomy to elite oversight early in the Mississippian period. This study examines storage locations, through examination of a newly recognized type of oversized ceramic storage technology, within the Moundville region. Data from this research are used to show that surplus production is not best explained using models of economic centralization. Rather, surplus production at early Moundville was organized by various distinct social groups storing and utilizing agricultural resources. Through time, some groups may have enjoyed greater success than others at producing surpluses. Evidence for storage is widely distributed, yet some differences in storage capacities are present. These spatial differences broadly mirror general patterns in the amount of labor invested in mound construction and the diachronic use of mounds across the site. These results allow us to consider the relationship between storage and relative surplus production, as well as the dynamic political-economic relations between distinct social groups through time in early complex agricultural societies.

SOUTH APPALACHIAN MISSISSIPPIAN AND PROTOHISTORIC MORTUARY PRACTICES IN SOUTHWESTERN NORTH CAROLINA

Mississippian societies of southwestern North Carolina are generally thought to have been less centralized and less hierarchical than their counterparts elsewhere in the Southeast. This paper compares and contrasts mortuary patterns at the Warren Wilson, Garden Creek, and Coweeta Creek sites to reconstruct patterns of social and spatial differentiation within late prehistoric and protohistoric communities in southwestern North Carolina. These sites include, respectively, a late prehistoric stockaded village, a platform mound and village, and a protohistoric Cherokee town with a public structure and several domestic dwellings. Distributions of burial goods and the placement of burials indicate that some social distinctions were reflected in the treatment of the dead by Mississippian and protohistoric groups in southwestern North Carolina, and that those distinctions were embedded in the architecture and built environment of these sites.

New Perspectives in Mississippian Archaeology

In recent years the pace of research on the late prehistoric Mississippian societies of eastern North America has accelerated. New data, methods, and theoretical goals are changing perspectives in Mississippian archaeology. Regional overviews and site syntheses provide unprecedented insights into the Mississippian phenomenon at local, regional, and continental scales. Traditional culture history, processualism, historical processualism, iconography, and neo-Darwinian archaeology are active theoretical orientations. Important research focuses on variability in Mississippian sociopolitical formations over time, organizational diversity among contemporaneous societies, and sources of political power. The new historicism and iconography place agency, identity, origins, factionalism, ideology, and meaning at the center of culture change, while many processualists continue to focus on developmental histories, economy, and control of material resources. Advances in physical and chemical analyses and the availability of remote sensing techniques are changing how Mississippian archaeology is conducted and expanding the kinds of data that are recovered. These diverse interests, methods, and goals have created considerable eclecticism in Mississippian archaeology.

On Delusions

On Delusions Robin A. Beck Jr. (bio) Like many Southeastern archaeologists, I have been thinking about Pauketat’s new book since its arrival (and even earlier—I recall its attention-grabbing title glaring up from an AltaMira advertisement several months prior to publication). Given the challenge that Pauketat has issued to his colleagues in Mississippian archaeology, it is timely and fitting that Native South offer its readers a forum such as this. At the risk of slipping into literary criticism, it seems important to begin not with what Pauketat has to say in Delusions, but rather with how he chooses to say it. Before I am pegged as someone with an excessive sensitivity to matters of tone, I should point out that this is not merely a matter of being nice. As Pauketat, channeling James Griffin, puts it, “we must criticize each other to move ahead.”1 I fully agree that critique is essential to the scholarly process, yet I believe that the way he makes his case threatens to overwhelm much of his message. He tells us at the beginning that “not wanting to offend, I borrow a technique from Kent Flannery”: the narrative device of the composite persona (Delusions, 4). But if we look closely, we find an immediate—if unintended—distinction between how Flannery and Pauketat use this device. In The Early Mesoamerican Village, Flannery refers to his three protagonists as “characters.”2 Pauketat refers to his four creations as “caricatures” (Delusions, 4). This simple distinction conveys much of what seems misguided in Pauketat’s tone. Flannery is able to recognize a part of himself in each of his composites: the Real Mesoamerican Archaeologist (RMA), the Skeptical Graduate Student (SGS), and the Great Synthesizer (GS).3 Perhaps because of his empathy, Flannery is careful to depict them as complex characters, [End Page 111] each of whom is trying to understand the early Mesoamerican village to the best of his abilities. Each has his own theoretical and methodological axes to grind and often goes about grinding these on his colleagues’ heads, but Flannery’s description of their questions and debates is always generous enough to portray them as fully human characters—as people—even as we are witness to their various faults and foibles. What is more, we find ourselves carried along in the debates because we are able to see each side; there are no heroes and villains in Flannery’s tale, just archaeologists grappling with their imperfect understanding of the past. Indeed, in the end RMA hands SGS a check and an airline ticket (out of his own funds, no less) to begin fieldwork testing some shiny new processual ideas, and SGS gives RMA a bottle of fine tequila (the kind with the worm still in the bottle). Flannery’s point is clear. If we are willing to get beyond the hyperbole and finger wagging, we might have something to learn from each other. In Delusions, Pauketat eschews this constructive approach for one that is easier, if less intellectually satisfying. True to his word, he offers two-dimensional “caricatures,” or straw men upon whom he can heap his scorn and abuse. The white hats in Pauketat’s tale are worn by the Uncertain Graduate Student (UGS) and by the Southern Pragmatist (and one could argue by Pauketat himself, who pops in now and then to offer sage advice to UGS).The dark hats are worn by Dr. Science and Darth Evader. Dr. Science is a processualist of the (now) old school, so attached to his rote explanations of Mississippian society—and so incapable of even understanding questions posed from a postprocessual perspective—that Pauketat concludes, “No reason to think that I could engage this guy in an interesting two-way conversation” (Delusions, 39). This is quite the departure from Flannery’s approach. But we should keep in mind that Dr. Science is only a caricature. It is Pauketat himself who later asserts that only by adopting his ideas can we “give voice to our indignation over the dark forces working against human history” (Delusions, 207–8). So his is a story with good and evil, of dark forces and those who (one must surmise) work for...

Examining Interaction and Identity in Prehistory: Mortuary Vessels from the Schild Cemetery

This study examines a subsample of the ceramic jar collection from the prehistoric Schild Cemetery of west-central Illinois to explore the possibility of identifying changing cultural identity in situations of culture contact and interaction. The relationship between ceramic vessels (and other types of material culture) with cultural identity is often studied, but in cases of cultural interaction or marriage between members of distinct groups, archaeological assemblages may prove incompatible to categorizations utilizing traditional typologies. This work presents a quantitative analysis of ceramic style to characterize prehistoric cultural interaction, a methodology which complements traditional typological analysis. The time period in question (ca. A.D. 1100) was one of broad social and political change in the region in which interaction, and likely intermarriage, took place between individuals from Late Woodland and Mississippian societies.

Leadership and Polity in Mississippian Society. Brian M. Butler , Paul D. Welch

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsLeadership and Polity in Mississippian Society. Brian M. Butler , Paul D. Welch Timothy R. PauketatTimothy R. Pauketat Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 63, Number 2Summer, 2007 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/jar.63.2.20371163 Views: 14Total views on this site Copyright 2007 The University of New MexicoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Leadership and polity in Mississippian society

Leadership and polity in Mississippian society

Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar

Architecture is the most visible physical manifestation of human culture. The built environment envelops our lives and projects our distinctive regional and ethnic identities to the world around us. Archaeology and architecture find common theoretical ground in their perspectives on the homes, spaces, and communities that people create for themselves. In this volume, prominent archaeologists examine the architectural design spaces of Mississippian towns and mound centers of the eastern United States. The diverse Mississippian societies, which existed between A.D. 900 and 1700, created some of the largest and most complex Native American archaeological sites in the United States. The dominant architectural feature shared by these communities was one or more large plazas, each of which was often flanked by buildings set on platform mounds.

Pottery and chronology at Angel

By analyzing the pottery found at a well-known archaeological site, Hilgeman constructs the long-awaited timeline for the rise and decline of this ancient society.Located near present-day Evansville, Indiana, the Angel site is one of the important archaeological towns associated with prehistoric Mississippian society. More than two million artifacts were collected from this site during excavations from 1939 to 1989, but, until now, no systematic survey of the pottery sherds had been conducted. This volume, documenting the first in-depth analysis of Angel site pottery, also provides scholars of Mississippian culture with a chronology of this important site. Angel is generally thought to have been occupied from before A.D. 1200 to 1450, but scholars have been forced to treat this period as one chronological unit without any sense of the growth and decline of the society that occupied it. Using radiocarbon assays and an analysis of its morphological and stylistic attributes of pottery, Sherri Hilgeman is able to divide the occupation of Angel into a series of recognizable stages. She then correlates those stages with similar ones at other archaeological excavations especially nearby Kincaid making it possible to compare Angel society with other native cultures of the lower Ohio Valley. Through this important contribution to native pottery studies, Hilgeman opens a window into the lifeways of prehistoric Angel society and places that society in the larger context of Mississippian culture.

The Indian's New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast.

In this concise but sweeping study, James Axtell depicts the complete range of transformations in southeastern Indian cultures as a result of contact, and often conflict, with European explorers and settlers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Stressing the dynamism and constant change in native cultures while showing no loss of Indian identity, Axtell effectively argues that the colonial Southeast cannot be fully understood without paying particular attention to its native inhabitants before their large-scale removal in the 1830s. Axtell begins by treating the irruption in native life of several Spanish entradas in the sixteenth century, most notably and destructively Hernando de Soto's, and the rapid decline of the great Mississippian societies in their wake. He then relates the rise and fall of the Franciscan missions in Florida to the aggressive advent of English settlement in Virginia and the Carolinas in the seventeenth century. Finally, he traces the largely symbiotic relations among the South Carolina English, the Louisiana French, and their native trading partners in the eighteenth-century deerskin business, and the growing dependence of the Indians on their white neighbors for necessities as well as conveniences and luxuries. Focusing on the primary context of interaction between natives and newcomers in each century - warfare, missions, and trade - and drawing upon a wide range of ethnohistorical sources, including written, oral, archaeological, linguistic, and artistic ones, Axtell gives a rich sense of the variety and complexity of Indian-white interactions and a clear interpretative matrix by which to assimilate the details. Based on the fifty-eighth series of Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures, The Indians' New South is a colourful, accessible account of the clash of cultures in the colonial Southeast. It will prove essential and entertaining reading for all students of Native America and the South.